“The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity.” I agree with the aforementioned quote from Camille Paglia’s article, “Revalorizing the Trades”. We, as college students, are pressured into office jobs. Physical engagement is no longer seen as gratifying but is looked down upon.
“Working with your hands is one of the main things that teaches you to think and solve problems. Finding the resources to make and fix things puts you in touch with some of the industries, people, and skills on which everything else is built.” People should learn trades. We need and rely on the people that provide services for us, such as fixing our cars, building houses, protecting our country, or even painting the pictures on our walls. Hands-on activities are what provide so many jobs around the world. I’m not bashing corporate jobs; they employ people, but not everyone is made for office jobs. As a college student, I have felt the pressure of working for a boring, uptight office job without taking into consideration my love for hands-on learning and expressing my creativity.
In the job market, hardly anyone wants to be the electrician or the farmer anymore. These “small” jobs are the foundation of our society. We need food, hence a farmer; we need electricity, hence an electrician; we need water, hence a plumber. No one seems to understand what you get out of using your hands to work. I guarantee that almost every time you finish a laboring project, you feel a sense of accomplishment and gratification. That sense of accomplishment and gratification is what Paglia was talking about when she said; “There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives.”
Camille Paglia had a very valid point in her article, “Revalorizing the Trades”. We need to inspire people to learn a trade and get inspired to use their hands as well as their minds. If people would take time to express themselves and be creative, I believe that people would be a lot less stressed. “…every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.” This idea may better help college students figure out what they want to do in life and open their minds to new and different fields of work.
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